Part Three: Taste the Rainbow!

So we're finally up to present day.  I really must blog more often if I'm going to have this much to say...

If you scroll back a few posts, you'll see that my last (first) 20-miler did NOT go so well.  I crashed and burned and learned a ton.  Now it's been more than 2 months, and I was ready to try again--and try a few new things:

1.  Drymax Hot Weather socks, as seen in the previous post.  Blister season is upon us, and I want to do everything in my power to keep my feet from being totally trashed like they were last year.   

2.   Gallowalking.  Jeff Galloway has helped countless numbers of people finish marathons using his run/walk method.  For today, I opted to run 4 minutes, walk 1, the whole way.  I had multiple reasons for doing so:

a) I wanted a gentle transition back to this distance, as the longest I've run since the last 20 was 16 miles.

b) I'm looking forward to another long run on the 4th of July, so I wanted to take it easy today.

c) I wanted to give the Galloway thing a fair shake.  I'm pretty sure I don't want to do it on race day, but it's a nice way to change things up in training.  I like for each workout to have a unique goal or twist.  Just running 20+ miles every other week or so might get kinda boring.  :)

3.  A new fuel source:

Seemed fitting since I'm so into this whole Rainbow of Running thing!

I'm happy to report that this 20-miler was SO much better than the last one!  I ran smarter, faster, and exponentially happier.  Although I only walked just over 10% of the total mileage, doing so helped me keep my HR in the "cool" zones for more than 90% of the run, and I felt so fantastic that I ran a negative split, letting myself push just a teensy bit during the last few miles.  For the last interval, I let myself go for it and finished my 20-miler running 5K pace!  Yay!

A few other notables from this run:

- I did the whole thing without music.  Are you kidding?  File this under miraculous, along with waking up before 5 on a day off, voluntarily running 20 miles by myself, and enjoying every minute of it.  But I did it.  Just listened to nature. 

- There was a lot of nature.  I saw birds, bunnies, dogs, deer, cows, a kitten, mice, squirrels, and....a skunk!  Pepe Le Pew walked across the road not 10 feet in front of me!  Needless to say, that one got my HR up, and I can only assume my Garmin counted the miles I ran backwards!

- God outdid Himself painting the sky this morning, and though the pic doesn't nearly do it justice, let's just say the sunrise was as colorful as my fuel source or my heart rate analysis.

Part Two: Progress!

So I would be remiss if I did not include a post to capture all the actual running progress since the Rainbow light bulb went off in my head.

When last we left our hero, running-wise, I was injured from the race, hobbling on a bad ankle and battling plantar fasciitis.  After those 8 excruciating miles and pain with every step, I took a day off completely, cross-trained the next day, and ran easy 4 of the next 5, with another rest day in between.  A week later, I was feeling good enough to attempt my first set of Yasso 800s.  Bart Yasso, running guru extraordinaire and chief running officer for Runner's World magazine, suggests running 800m repeats in the time you hope to run your marathon.  According to the theory, if I can run up to 10 x 800m in 4:00 (minutes) each, I can run a marathon in 4:00 (hours).  I started with a set of 4 and nailed the workout!  As an added bonus, Bart himself congratulated me in a tweet!  :)

Two weeks after Wounded Warrior, I wanted another shot at the race.  I drove out to Las Colinas so I could run the same course.  Hopped out my car in time to catch this...

I wasn't necessarily trying to break the 2-hour mark this time (though thought it was theoretically possible if things went well).  Although it wasn't raining, I had a lot of extra hurdles to overcome compared to race day: no taper, no race day adrenaline, and no water stations (which meant carrying a fuel belt with three 10 oz. bottles).  Still, I approached it optimistically...

And still failed to hit my mark.  :(

BUT, I ran smarter, faster, and happier than I had 2 weeks earlier.  I still crashed after about an hour, but I did a better job of listening to my body and didn't blow up nearly as badly.  I actually finished feeling human and could still hear out of both ears.  I ran the whole thing this time, except for one stop to refill my water bottles, which were nearly dry with a couple miles still to go.  Progress, not perfection.  I'll take it.

The way I crashed an hour into my run (again) sparked something from my reading.  Lactate threshold (LT) is sometimes characterized as the pace one could hold for about 30-60 minutes.  So apparently, that's what I've been hitting trying these half marathons.  From what I understand, it's not necessarily that my heart rate is out of control (I was in averaging in the 180s for about 8 miles this time), but that is an indicator that I'm bumping up against LT, and at some point, it's like being on a sinking ship, taking on water faster than you can bail.  If your muscles accumulate lactate faster than they can clear it, you drown, so to speak.  So now, I'm trusting my training plan to raise my LT so that I can hold my marathon goal pace for 4 hours instead of just one.  :)

I was excited about this discovery and the overall improvement but still disappointed that I didn't seem to be on track with my training, based on the earlier "shave a minute/week off the predicted marathon time" approach using McRun. 

Thank God for Thursday.  For my speed session, I decided to run a 5K, which I hadn't done for time since January.  Five months ago, I'd run it in 29:37 (9:31 pace), and that was only my second time running 5K in under 30 minutes.  Then, this happened:

I've taken more than a minute per mile off my time since January!  The most exciting part of this for me is seeing that 17 weeks before MCM, it's predicting a 4:13 marathon.  Yes, 5K predictions are probably less reliable than 13.1, but this shows what I am capable of if I'm not at LT for an hour.  

Go back to the 2-second rule with weight loss.  I am on pace to lose another 15-20 pounds, which alone would get me to my 4-hour goal...

...Or let's say I don't lose another pound, but it's 60 degrees outside instead of 80.  They say for every 10 degrees above 50F, performance declines by 3%.  Over the past 10 years, average temperature for MCM has been in the mid-50s, so 60 seems conservative.  That still means a 6% improvement over the numbers I'm putting up under current conditions.  Factor that in, and predicted time drops to 3:58+.  

If either of those things alone gets me to my goal, imagine what both of them together with an extra 4 months of training, a taper, and some race day adrenaline could do!  I'm pumped!

As if Thursday wasn't already great enough, I also got a retweet from the hallowed Hal Higdon (so starstruck on Twitter right now!), and came home to these:

All told, a banner running day!  Couldn't wait to try these out on my 20-miler this weekend....

Part One: I love it when a plan comes together!

So much has happened since the last post!  I'm surprised my brain hasn't exploded from so many ideas! Thus, it'll take a three-part post to capture it all...

After losing my coach, I knew I needed to come up with a plan...or hire someone else to do it for me.  I came to realize no one would spend more time poring over my data than me, and although I am not (yet) an expert on marathon training, I have sharp analytical skills and am a pretty quick study.  I also have this little hamster running on a wheel in my head...the family calls her Haley.  :)

So Haley and I teamed up and tackled several of the seminal works on marathon training:
- Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon
- Marathon: You Can Do It! by Jeff Galloway
- Hanson's Marathon Method: A Renegade Path to Your Fastest Marathon by Luke Humphrey

It was my second read through Higdon, and it was cool to see how my perspective had changed with an extra 1,000 miles under my feet.  I also went back and looked at my highlights from two of Matt Fitzgerald's books: Racing Weight and The New Rules of Marathon & Half-Marathon Nutrition.

And then, a spreadsheet was born.

I titled it, "Marathon Wisdom," created a column for each of the 4 authors listed above, and did a side by side comparison of their approaches.  Areas of agreement in bold, disagreement in italics.  For good measure, I highlighted things I think are key to my own training in yellow, greyed out the stuff I was vehemently opposed to, and used pink to mark things that piqued my interest for inclusion in my own plan.

And then it was time to create the plan.  New spreadsheet.  The first page started with key principles I want to adhere to in my training.  Run happy, first and foremost.  Beyond that, train as much as I can without breaking.  :)  Alternate hard days and easy days, and follow the 80/20 rule (80% easy running). Gradually increase mileage to 60/week (according to one source, beyond 60, risk of infection doubles), and try to hold that for several weeks before the marathon.  Two steps forward and one step back when building mileage, with at least 2 weeks between super long runs.  Include speed work once/week, and be sure to run an adequate number of miles at (or just faster than) goal pace.  No more than one race/month before the big day, with time for a 10-day to 3-week taper at the end.  Simple, right?

Between the experts, my former coach, friends, and my own creativity, I had several ideas about specific workouts I could do to achieve the above objectives, so I created another sheet for key workouts.  I listed different types of long runs I want to do in one column, speed workouts in another, and strategies for easy runs in another.  Then it was time to prioritize those and put them in some sort of order, expecting that I'll be able to handle progressively harder workouts as time goes by.

The next step was fitting those key workouts into a calendar, which, you guessed it, required creation of yet another spreadsheet.  Upcoming races were anchor points, and I included work & social commitments so I could be realistic about how much time I could spend on any given day.  I started dropping in long runs, spacing them with some tempo work on weeks between the super long ones, and with a few exceptions, I dedicated Thursdays to speed work.  Then I added easy runs on the days in between to get to total mileage for the week, with 1-2 designated rest days each week.  I gradually increased mileage to 60/week, while dropping back here and there along the way, sometimes to taper for that month's race.  I color coded each planned run using the Rainbow of Running, which gives me a nice visual representation of hard and easy days....and makes it pretty!  I went the extra mile (sorry) and calculated the expected number of miles in each HR zone, allowing me to predict how closely I'll follow the 80/20 rule.  This was trickiest part.  I actually landed closer to 75%.  But after careful consideration, I decided the difference was not great enough to merit significant changes to the plan, as my approximations don't really take into account how much lower my heart rate should be at the same paces in a couple months, when the weather cools off and I'm super fit from additional training.  The reality is that I probably will end up closer to 80/20...and might even have to start pushing myself a little harder to get 20% of my work above lactate threshold by then.  We'll see.  :)

That's the beauty of this little plan.  It's mine.  It's totally customized to me and totally tweakable by me at any time for any reason.  The perfect marriage of structure with flexibility.  And so far, I'm loving it!

The Rainbow of Running

So I've been reflecting on Sunday's race and my relationship with my body.  After doing a little data crunching, I noticed that what distinguished my best runs from my worst was my heart rate.  On the good runs, I would push myself comfortably hard (or for a short period, just beyond) and finish feeling exhilarated.  But if I pushed too hard, I would crash, and the results were disastrous.  Couple this with what I've been learning about the different training benefits of easy days vs. hard days, and I've come up with a new approach to guide my training.  I call it the Rainbow of Running:

190+ - Uncomfortably hard - bad for me      

180s - Uncomfortably hard - good for me    

170s - Comfortably hard                            

160s - Moderate                                       

150s - Easy                                             

<150 - So easy it's hard  (painfully slow)      

The heart rates are just ballpark numbers, subject to fluctuations in weather and terrain, but at least it gives me a starting point.  I have yet to determine exactly what percentage of time I need to spend in each zone, although there seems to be a consensus that one should follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of miles should be easy.  So I need to plan to spend most of my time in the cool color zones.  And after Sunday, I hope to God to stay out of the red zone from now on!

This approach also maps onto Sunday's lesson about the importance of running happy.  Run smart, yes.  Run fast, preferably.  But by all means, RUN HAPPY.  As luck would have it, I already have the t-shirt!

We Begin Again, Constantly

I lost my running coach.  While I would have expected to be devastated by such a turn of events, I feel strangely liberated.  I didn't even know it at the time, but when I was working with him, there was something I was fighting against.  Myself.

I asked him to coach me because I wanted him to push me and help me push myself.  But the approach of mind mastering body was creating a hostile relationship between the two.  My mind would push my body, and my body would push back.  Sunday's disaster was a supreme example.  And that is not how I want to live.  I want to cultivate a relationship where my mind, body, and spirit work together in harmony.  I want to kindly ask my body to perform and have it respond, not demand obedience only to have it rebel.  As I no longer have a coach to listen to, I am recommitting myself to listening to my body, believing that it will reward me by rising to the occasion when I ask it to.

I don't yet know what this will mean for my running plan...or whether I will try to find another coach.  My training calendar is once again a clean slate, and there are no rules.  I get to decide whether I want to resurrect the mile/month plan.  I have the option of including strength training and cross-training, both of which were casualties of working with a coach whose primary focus was on running and who forbid other types of training on designated rest days.  There are a myriad of different kinds of speed workouts I can play with, balancing mixing things up with repeating the same workouts so I can see my progress.  There are as many approaches to training for a marathon as there are coaches, and I've been reading about different philosophies, which I may try to synthesize into a plan that I believe will work for me.  I will gratefully take what I learned from my coach in the time that I had the opportunity to work with him and see how I can use that moving forward.  It's a little scary to be on my own again...but also very freeing.

And I have a little time to figure things out.  I gutted out 8 excruciating miles yesterday, hobbling along with a bad ankle (probably tweaked going down a muddy hill on Sunday) and plantar fasciitis.  I can barely walk now.  So, the first step in listening to my body is to take a day off!  Hopefully, I'll be back to good this weekend...

Wakeup Call: Wounded Warrior Half Marathon - Race Recap

I've been very excited about the Wounded Warrior Half, but all week I was in a quandary about the time goal.  After Heels & Hills, I'd hoped to take 5 minutes off in 5 weeks and get under 2 hours, which means holding a 9:09 pace for 13.1 miles.  But in my training runs, I repeatedly struggled to run even four 9-minute miles in a row (succeeding only in Seattle where it was 52 degrees!), much less over a longer distance. 

A much more reasonable goal was 2:03:33 (9:26 pace), just a smidge faster than the 9:37 pace I ran at H&H and seemingly very doable.  According to McRun, that would put me running a half marathon at a pace that would predict a 4:20 marathon, exactly where I wanted to be 20 weeks from Marine Corps.  (I don't know that progress is necessarily linear, but the idea of shaving a minute/week off the predicted time seemed like a reasonable approach to working toward the 4-hour goal.)

Still, after talking with my coach and praying about it, I felt like should go for it.  I reviewed all the things that could help me run better on race day than I had in training, and coincidentally came up with 13 factors that might make it possible:

1. Being stronger from runs
2. Being down 10 pounds!
3. Being better adapted to the Texas heat after running in it for a few weeks
4. Being on a flatter course than I train on
5. Being rested from tapering this week
6. A new strategy of fat-loading followed by carbo-loading
7. Having an energy gel before I started (as well as 3 during the run)
8. Having a small bottle of water to give me more control over my hydration
9. Getting extra zip from my Zipfizz after not having caffeine for a week
10. Race day adrenaline
11. Having people I care about believe in me and waiting at the finish line
12. What I like to call the "triumph of the human spirit"
13. If at all possible, a miracle from the Almighty.  :) 

Plus, I reasoned that even if I couldn't hold the pace, I could probably still hit 2:03:33 and/or at least PR...

Mom & I got up at 4:30, left the house at 5:15, and arrived at 5:45, an hour before the official start time...which was then pushed back an hour because of lightening and thunderstorms.  We waited in a parking garage, and I bemoaned the futility of my caffeine ingestion at 5:45 (suggested an hour before race time) and started to get a bit hungry!  At least I had the foresight to get a good picture BEFORE the race started, figuring I wouldn't look nearly this good after!

 
Coach had given me a warmup plan, which I did my best to approximate once we got the warning that the race would start in 10 minutes, but there was no way to execute exactly as planned. 

We stood in the rain as the national anthem was sung, remembering the Wounded Warriors and why we were all here...

Then the horn sounded, and we were off!

Mile 1 - I felt okay, except for a little pain in my side, and I was holding the pace I needed to break the 2-hour barrier.

Mile 2 - The rain was still coming down, and parts of the course were under water.  A guy ran into me as we were coming down a muddy, grassy hill, and I was lucky that I stayed on my feet.

Mile 3 - Still had the pain in my side, but I tried to make up the seconds I lost in the mud on mile 2.

Mile 4 - My heart rate had already climbed to around 190, and I could feel the wheels starting to come off.

Mile 5 - Nausea set in, and I knew I was in trouble. My pace had slowed but my HR had not.  I started to let go of the sub-2 goal and pushed myself to try to keep going so I could maybe at least PR.

Mile 6 - By the halfway point, even a PR seemed out of reach.  My new goal was simply to finish.

Mile 7 - I decided if I was going to be out here anyway, I ought to get something out of it and at least try to run smart.  I started to view the race as a training run and thought if I could back off and recover for the next 3 miles, I might be able to pick up the pace for the last 3 and find some value in that.

Mile 8 - 9 - I skipped my planned GU (and did so again at mile 12) because I didn't think I could keep it down.  At one point, pain in my side slowed me to a hobble.  Tears were stinging my eyes, but I held them back and pressed on...and did so despite my music cutting out on me.  Thankfully, I had thought to put my phone in a ziploc before putting it in the holder on my belt, but Siri kept interrupting the music, and then eventually there was none.  I think my headphones died in the rain!

Mile 10 - Time to pick up the pace.  And I did.  Until I came to the flood.  The entire course was covered in water, and there was no going around it, only through it.  I plunged my feet into ankle-deep water and prayed not to get debilitating blisters the last 3 miles.  As my shoes filled with water, I just had to let go and try to embrace the experience.

Mile 11 - 12 - After the flood, I completely lost motivation to kill myself out there.  I just tried to go slow and steady and make it to the finish line.  I resisted temptation to walk except thru the aid stations, and the race had simply become running as best I could from one station to the next.

Mile 13 - Once I passed Mile 12, I decided to turn it up, to the extent that such was possible, and I did finish the last 1.2 faster than the ones before it...though considerably behind the pace at which I'd started the day.  And no, 1.2 is not a typo.  Because we had to weave around so much standing water, it made for a long course.  Tough on a day when I was so ready to be DONE.

One bright spot was hearing my Mom cheering for me as I crossed the finish line and getting to see her & my aunt as soon as I was done.  Unfortunately, I was kinda dazed and struggled to form coherent sentences.  I couldn't hear out of my left ear and felt like I was in a state of emergency.  I remained calm but made a bee line for the car, stopping only to grab my medal and a bottle of water on the way. 

Thankfully, it's a finishers medal.  Not a "had a great race" medal.  Additional prizes aside, it's the same medal received by person who crossed the finish line first...and the person who crossed last. 

After completely blowing up, my time today was 2:20:50 - significantly worse than Heels & Hills or even Cowtown.  (My average pace today was more than a minute slower than what I ran a month ago, even though I'm in better shape now!)  Guess that's what happens when you swing for the fences and miss!  But as awful as it was from start to finish, I am glad that it happened--and happened today (not in October)--because I learned 2 things:

1. Given how badly I self-destructed trying to run 9:09 for 13.1, I have a lot of work to do if I'm going to hold the same pace for twice the distance.

2. Enjoying the experience is more important than running a 4-hour marathon. 

Massage in the morning, and back to work on Tuesday! 

Next up: Too Hot to Handle 15K on 07/14